I'm putting The Locker Room in my cart and I was wondering what lighting you used in the promos? They look fantastic :)

Thank you!

Lets see.. the lighting changes a little depending on which render but in general the idea is:

- HDRI Map - An exceptionally bright one with lots of white bounce. I used a snow scene for these renders.
- Directional light acting as sun going through one set of windows.
- Point light behind the camera and to the right or left side of it, typically in the opposite direction of my directional light, set to about 25 watts and positioned to pool softly near the floor and about 2/3rds up the wall to aid global illumination and make the red bleed/glow subtly.
- Area light emitters on the light tube geometry set to about 100 watts.

And then I used a camera with:
- A wider lens view - somewhere around 45 - 50
- f-stop of 2.8
- Shutter speed of probably around 1/50 or 1/60 but I can't remember now

I either used Octane or Maxwell render for these. I can't remember which. Its been done for months. Octane has a Studio plugin to convert the materials. Both programs have great global illumination results. You can get the same exact effects in LuxRender with the Luxus plugin.

If I used Studio for this then I would have added two more point lights to the above set up with red sampled from the locker paint and set low to scatter along the same lockers to achieve that subtle glow effect from sun bounce. I would have also used UberEnvironment with a maximum trace distance setting of around 50 with a mid grey set as the color or the render would be too dark in Studio.

So there you have it. This is probably way more of an answer than you expected but I wanted to be complete. It turns out it wasn't a quick reply. LOL - I hope you don't mind.

I'll download the Octane Render demo and give it a try, and it might be time to splurge on Maxwell now that V3 is out. :)

If you don't mind me asking, can you tell me which one you prefer and why? I'd love to know which one you like best :)

Thanks again!

If you can swing it, then I whole heartedly recommend a commercial Maxwell license. It is by far the most artist friendly, easy to learn and well documented and supported render engine I have ever used. It even replaced my Mental Ray in Maya workflow for non-DAZ-related projects.

- FIRE is kick butt awesome. This is a voxel based render preview system. To us artists, that translates to: See your rendered scene previews instantly. It takes me about 10 minutes for an entire interior scene lighting and render set up whereas in Mental Ray it would take me about an hour and a half to do the same thing because I don't have to do test renders between scene tweaks: http://vimeo.com/79091628

- Material set up is stupid easy. They've made this process so easy you could actually catch up on some shows while setting up your scene and not miss a beat.

- This render engine is not limited by specific graphic cards. If you're system can render a one figure in one environment DAZ or Poser scene with full lighting and quality settings in 2 hours or less, then chances are it won't have any issue with Maxwell.

And of course, since it is an unbiased render engine you also have:

- Physically accurate lighting
- Real world camera rules and lenses

The cons to keep in mind:

- Unbiased means slower render engine. If you are good with lighting, you will get a nice result in less time but don't expect grain free renders in a couple of minutes. The locker room renders took me about 4 hours each on my monster rig machine. You can also combat this by using this service if you want something done wicked fast and don't mind fronting some change for it. I use them now and then: http://www.rebusfarm.net/en/ - They have a sweet plugin for Maxwell that makes it nice and easy to port the info over. If I am under the gun for promo renders, I ship them there and have them back in an hour or so, even for multiple cameras.

- Images will have a ton of noise for a long while. This is usually normal but if you don't see it at least starting to clear after an hour, check your lighting. Make sure you are lighting for your camera, not your own eyes. Your camera will see less than you can so it will need more light than you think. Your lighting skills need to be dead on or you'll pay the painful price in render time.

So yeah. There you go. Hehe.

I like this render engine so much I put a little birdie in Spheric's ear about it. He is the excellent dev who made the Luxus plugin for LuxRender. You never know what can come of that.

Thanks for the great info :) I think I'll ask for Maxwell for my birthday - it would make a great present :) Until then, I've tried Reality 2.5 but so far I get a lot of Firefly's using a multi light setup, so I'll try just mesh lights and see how that turns out - they seem to cause the least problems.

That Render Farm looks awesome as well - if I get into modeling environments I'm sure that will come in handy :)

Fantastic images! I think your Luxus Pro training tutorial is probably one of the best purchases I've made here on Daz. Thank you for taking the time to make it as I've learned tons about Uberlighting from it!

If you can swing it, then I whole heartedly recommend a commercial Maxwell license. It is by far the most artist friendly, easy to learn and well documented and supported render engine I have ever used. It even replaced my Mental Ray in Maya workflow for non-DAZ-related projects.

Thank you for the information. I went to the Maxwell Render website and was excited that they have a "learning edition" available, which will give me the opportunity to learn the render engine and then determine if I want to purchase a license.

BTW, I second @AngryChair's sentiment. I loved your training videos for Luxus. It really reduced my learning curve of the LuxRender plugin. Learning more about lighting was a definite plus! :)

Edit: Doh! Okay, the learning edition does have a price tag but it's still a lot less than a commercial license. :)